We can make SQL Server scale really well, but we can’t scale ourselves.

Although our Immersion Events are extremely popular, and in high demand, we can’t spend all year traveling and teaching, and we can’t come to everyone’s favorite location, so we have to limit the number that we can do. Our 2013 public training schedule has been solidified, all the contracts are signed, and we’ll be releasing the four locations (Tampa, Chicago, London, Bellevue) for registrations later this week.

But in addition to in-person training, how can we create a scalable way to get really good SQL Server training to all the people across the world who want it?

The only answer is to put our training online.

We’re not talking about recording our Immersion Events – those will remain an in-person, intense, learning experience for those who want them. We’re not moving away from our Immersion Events. Instead we’re allowing those who cannot afford the time, travel, or cost of an Immersion Event to benefit from our knowledge. And for those who do attend our Immersion Events, for that unique experience, the online training will complement and enhance the classroom learning. Indeed, anyone who attends our Immersion Events from 2013 onwards will also receive access to our online training, creating a perfect, hybrid learning solution. We’ll also be arranging something similar for past attendees too.

We’re talking about recording our entire corpus of SQL Server, virtualization, hardware, I/O subsystem, HA, DR, design, troubleshooting, performance, and more knowledge, literally many hundreds of hours, over the next 3-4 years and making it all available for anyone around the world to watch as easily as possible. Anyone will be able to learn from us from now on, in the manner and pace that they choose.

And we’re doing it through a new strategic partnership with our good friends at Pluralsight, led by Aaron Skonnard. As we see it, Pluralsight is the leader in providing highest-quality, online technical training that’s accessible across the world, using a very simple interface and with all kinds of pricing models to fit everyone from individuals to large corporations, from as little as US$29/month. We will be developing a core SQL Server curriculum for Pluralsight users and rapidly populating it with 3-4+ hour courses on everything to do with SQL Server. This will add to the more than 200 courses on other development and IT topics that Pluralsight offers, expanding at a rate of 20 new courses per month!

To celebrate the start of this great partnership, Pluralsight is offering you all complete access to three of our SQL Server courses, for free for 30 days, starting this week – with absolutely no obligation.

The three courses you can watch for free, each of which are 4+ hours long, are:

SQL Server: Performance Tuning Using Wait Statistics (by Paul

SQL Server: Transact-SQL Basic Data Retrieval (by Joe)

SQL Server: Collecting and Analyzing Trace Data (by Jonathan)

To sign up for this, all you have to do is follow SQLskills and Pluralsight on Twitter and you get sent a registration code, then sit back and learn. The special-offer sign-up is available until September 11th, and then you have 30 days from when you sign up to view the three courses.

You can always sign up, get your code and then move away from twitter if you want… but, that’s the (incredibly easy/powerful) mechanism that Pluralsight uses for these promotions. We discussed other options but all agreed that creating a twitter account is super easy and also very valuable – even if you only follow a few folks (and don’t forget #sqlhelp)!

Thanks for sharing this. Unfortunately I missed the free pass. This is really good quality of videos.
The best one so far for me in sql server is "SQL Server: Myths and Misconceptions" by Paul.
Paul,
I have a question on this.
In "Performance myths and misconceptions–checkpoints",
you mentioned that checkpoint writes the pages to disk but as much I am aware, checkpoint only marks the pages which are ready to written in disk and then lazy-writer writes the marked pages to disk.
Can you please clarify my understanding?